Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front

By Aaron Hiltner

American soldiers overseas during World War II were famously said to be “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But the assaults, rapes, and other brutal acts didn’t only happen elsewhere, far away from a home front depicted as safe and unscathed by the “good war.” To the contrary, millions of American and Allied troops regularly poured into ports like New York and Los Angeles while on leave. Euphemistically called “friendly invasions,” these crowds of men then forced civilians to contend with the same kinds of crime and sexual assault unfolding in places like Britain, France, and Australia.

With unsettling clarity, Aaron Hiltner reveals what American troops really did on the home front. While GIs are imagined to have spent much of the war in Europe or the Pacific, before the run-up to D-Day in the spring of 1944 as many as 75% of soldiers were stationed in US port cities, including more than three million who moved through New York City. In these cities, largely uncontrolled soldiers sought and found alcohol and sex, and the civilians living there—women in particular—were not safe from the violence fomented by these de facto occupying armies. Troops brought their pocketbooks and demand for “dangerous fun” to both red-light districts and city centers, creating a new geography of vice that challenged local police, politicians, and civilians. Military authorities, focused above all else on the war effort, invoked written and unwritten legal codes to grant troops near immunity to civil policing and prosecution.

The dangerous reality of life on the home front was well known at the time—even if it has subsequently been buried beneath nostalgia for the “greatest generation.” Drawing on previously unseen military archival records, Hiltner recovers a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II history, demonstrating that the war’s ill effects were felt all over—including by those supposedly safe back home.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226687186

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Taking Leave, Taking Liberties

Taking Leave, Taking Liberties

American Troops on the World War II Home Front

Aaron Hiltner

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68704-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68718-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226687186.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hiltner, Aaron, author.

Title: Taking leave, taking liberties : American troops on the World War II home front / Aaron Hiltner.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019038422 | ISBN 9780226687049 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226687186 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Social aspects—United States. | World War, 1939–1945—Women. | Civil-military relations—United States.

Classification: LCC D744.7.U6 H55 2020 | DDC 940.53/73—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038422

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Tessa and Evangeline

Contents

Introduction

What Happened on the Home Front

Chapter One

Making the Military Man

Chapter Two

Taking Liberty

Chapter Three

Women Face the Uniform

Chapter Four

The Militarized City

Epilogue

Postwar Invasions and Occupations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography of Primary Sources

Index

Introduction

What Happened on the Home Front

On August 14, 1945, American troops stationed across the Pacific Rim—in Manila, Chungking, Okinawa, and elsewhere—huddled around shortwave radios as President Harry Truman announced the surrender of Japan and the end of a brutal and merciless island-hopping campaign. Soldiers and sailors celebrated by firing bullets, flak, and bright, orange tracers in the air. Some careened through the streets in jeeps, wild with euphoria that they no longer faced the deadly prospect of invading the Japanese mainland. Others formed conga lines and jubilantly sang Don’t Fence Me In.

The impromptu fireworks, joyriding, and celebrations, however, quickly turned violent. In one Pacific liberty port, where troops took furloughs and leave, some ten thousand uniformed men poured into the downtown streets. The city crackled with a near-constant barrage of firecrackers like a battery of machine guns. Local civilians and police watched from their now-stranded cars and sidewalk corners. Already out of booze, troops hurled bottles and bricks through store display windows, stealing alcohol, jewelry, and more. Seeing the looting, smashing crowd of sailors, one reporter wrote: You couldn’t stop it if you tried, not short of tear gas and fire hoses. Drunken rioters overturned cars, set them ablaze, or transformed them into battering rams to crash through more shop fronts. Some climbed atop their vehicles and reenacted the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Soon, the men were fighting each other: one marine savagely beat an army private with his bare fists, leaving him to die on the sidewalk. GIs also brawled with civilians in streets strewn with paper and shattered glass as long-standing tensions between the occupiers and the occupied boiled over. Soldiers and sailors also cornered women, tearing their dresses, kissing them forcibly, and sometimes beating the men who were escorting them. GIs, one woman recalled, were pulling girls’ pants off and sailing them down the street. Men were kissing, and practically raping, everybody. At least six rapes did occur. You put young girls with them and add liquor, and that’s what happens, a police officer later asserted. Rather than ordering Shore Patrol to break up the riots and assaults, the rear admiral in command merely requested that the sailors go back to their ships.

The chaos lasted through two more nights. Hospital workers struggled to cope with the enormous number of injuries and cases of alcohol poisoning. When the police failed to investigate the numerous instances of rape, one incredulous health director asked: What do they think we examined at the hospital last night—ghosts? Finally, after the authorities decided that the many brawls and assaults appeared to be getting out of hand, a combination of MPs and local police formed a phalanx and slowly cleared the streets.

Three days of peace riots had brought at least eleven deaths, over a thousand injuries, and tens of thousands of dollars in property damage. In the following months, city and military officials launched an investigation, but no one was charged or court-martialed. The grand jury supposedly scrutinizing the riots held that when large numbers of young men realize that they are freed from war they are prone to celebrate overzealously. The army’s intelligence summary admitted that the conduct of personnel was generally riotous and that women were assaulted but dismissed the situation as a temporary emergency. When asked about the riot and the unremitting criminality, the mayor gazed off into space and responded merely that the police and navy did a good job when they took over.

This was San Francisco at the outbreak of peace. New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, also endured drunkenness, sexual assault, and riots during V-J Day celebrations. Yet this moment was not an aberration. Troop crime plagued American cities throughout the war, and civilians—especially women—lived with many of the same dangers and fears felt by the residents of occupied cities overseas. Women’s groups, businesses, politicians, and police struggled to come to terms with servicemen’s impact on their cities, protesting and fighting the military to regain local control of policing, regulation of businesses, curfews, and other municipal issues. While white troops proved stubbornly immune to effective oversight by civilian authorities and sometimes even military ones, African American and other nonwhite troops were harassed by police, subjected to hate crimes, and tormented by military authorities, who were often white supremacists.

This book recovers the history of American liberty ports—cities in the continental United States that were profoundly affected by military mobilization because they were destinations for millions of sailors and soldiers. The most important hubs for troops—cities like New York, Boston, Norfolk, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—saw the relationships and conflicts that developed between servicemen, civilians, and the authorities charged with policing them. Recovering this history overturns the idea that the home front was a protected place, unscathed by the violence embroiling the rest of the globe. Indeed, soldiers effectively occupied many US cities. Sixteen million Americans served in the military, passing through towns near training camps, cities along transit lines, and ports of embarkation. During the war, over three million servicemen moved through New York City alone. Moreover, many of these troops never went abroad. Before the spring of 1944, when preparations for D-Day accelerated, 65–75 percent of all soldiers were stationed domestically. Twenty-five percent of the army never left the country at all. Liberty ports became international zones of trade and entertainment where GIs sought alcohol, sex, and other excitements. And these were not simply American spaces. The presence of Commonwealth, French, Dutch, and Chinese servicemen made it that much harder for municipal and military officials to police nightlife and crime. Taking this unexamined history into account gives us a new, unsettling picture of the home front and of World War II itself.

GI stories focus on the drama of combat, culminating in places like Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Anzio, Normandy, and Iwo Jima. Popular histories, memoirs, and films follow a common arc: young, naive, slightly scared teenagers, farmers, and factory workers join the army and leave home for exotic and dangerous locales where they soon endure their first harrowing experiences of combat, quickly form bonds across ethnic and geographic lines, and eventually become a cohesive unit of hardened, resourceful veterans. That arc mirrors that of the one often told about the nation as a whole: a young, emerging America stumbles at first but soon rises to overcome its prewar isolation and offer liberation, leadership, and democracy around the globe. This good war story necessarily focuses on troops outside the United States who liberate and rebuild a world broken by the horrors of fascism and imperialism—our boys in uniform become a new light for an old world in need of an American Century.

These combat stories are popular and for good reason. Anyone who has read a memoir like Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed understands that the suffering servicemen faced was real. Those who fought and those who died deserve to be remembered. But the combat soldier’s story can reveal only so much. Estimates vary as to how many troops actually saw combat—perhaps as few as 10 percent—but less than half were ever in a combat zone. In the European Theater of Operations, for example, combat troops made up only 19 percent of the total forces deployed in April 1945. This small tooth-to-tail ratio meant that far more soldiers spent the war working on logistics and transportation or in a vast bureaucracy that managed huge swaths of new property, paychecks, and the health care of millions.

But all soldiers dealt with the daily privations and annoyances of a regimented life. While only a few stormed a beach or flanked along a hedgerow, many exercised the privilege of the uniform while taking leave. Carousing in bars, cornering and chasing women, and beating up the guy not in uniform quickly emerged as a compelling marker of what it meant to be a soldier. Indeed, servicemen derided civilian life as a way to accept and lionize their status as military men.

GI carousing from Australia, China, and Okinawa to Britain, France, and Germany was enormously disruptive. Rape, assault, petty crime, and casual violence became all too common hallmarks of American liberations and occupations. In Commonwealth nations, the phrase overpaid, oversexed, and over here served as a shorthand description of GIs. By 1942, for example, the growing contingent of American personnel in Brisbane erupted into conflicts with Australian troops over women and increasingly scarce goods like cigarettes. The Australians had grievances and they had very solid reasons to be aggrieved, recalled one officer. The Yanks had everything—the girls, the canteens and all the rest of it—and our blokes were completely ostracized in their own city. Tensions eventually blew up in November with the two-day Battle of Brisbane, in which the city’s blackout restrictions had to be lifted just to restore order. In Sydney, women stepped out into the darkened streets wielding hatpins, bag needles, spike files, penknives, cayenne peppers, scissors, or weighted torches as they watched for any brown-out Casanova who makes a nuisance of himself. In Britain, Americans caused similar disturbances from London’s Piccadilly Circus—where Yanks raced to find the women called Piccadilly Commandos for some vicious debauchery—to smaller coastal towns like Weymouth and Portland used as staging grounds for the D-Day invasion. Across the Channel in France, troops arrived as liberators and armed tourists but also as persistent threats to local women and civilians. And, in China, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan, servicemen thirsting for sex and drink repeatedly threatened both local and international relations well into the postwar era.

The American home front has long been portrayed as separate and shielded from these overseas stories. Of course, historians have recognized the conflicts that brewed back home: Japanese internment, race riots, and a wide variety of labor disputes were the most visible signs of a turbulent age. Women took jobs in the defense plants in unprecedented numbers, finding new levels of independence and fulfillment but also harassment and hazardous conditions. Popular images again and again depict wartime women as Rosie the Riveter, worried wives and daughters, or doting lovers waiting for a sailor’s kiss or a letter from abroad. But, in almost all these, the home front is separate from the war front. Soldiers and sailors are absent from this landscape or make only brief cameos in events like the Zoot Suit Riots.

As a result, many people believe that Americans on the home front uniquely avoided the effects of war and of conflicts between civilians and the military. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God, mused Lewis H. Lapham in 1979. David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear similarly concluded: Beyond the war’s dead and wounded and their families, few Americans had been touched by the staggering sacrifices and unspeakable anguish that the war had visited upon millions of other people around the globe. Even leading military historians like Aaron O’Connell believe that, in World War II, civil-military friction was relatively low. But the stories of the liberty ports show that civil-military conflict was a defining feature of the home front experience.

Even when the often-poor behavior of American troops abroad has been recognized, it has been contrasted with an idealized secure home front. Mary Louise Roberts’s gripping What Soldiers Do endorses the idea that it took exposure to a foreign country’s supposedly exotic traditions and loose morals—specifically France’s primitive and oversexed culture—to make soldiers decide that pursuing and even forcing themselves on women was justified. In this conception: The US military protected the ‘virtuous’ American woman back home at the expense of the French prostitute. The home front is made safe as the people of Normandy face the unleashed urges of servicemen. The US military protected American families, Roberts explains, from the spectacle of GI promiscuity while leaving French families unable to escape it. But the truth is that the folks back home were not safe from the revelry and violence that accompanied invasions and occupations. An American woman in Boston likely had little more legal recourse than the French woman in Le Havre.

Compared to firebombing, the Blitz, and the horrors visited on the Eastern Front and China, what Americans experienced was mild. But civilians in stateside ports, stopover cities, and boomtowns nevertheless shared much with those living in war-touched cities abroad. Certainly, it would be safer for a civilian to be in New York than in Normandy during the invasion. Yet V-J Day in liberty ports saw uncontrolled violence and sexual assaults like those accompanying the breakout in the Norman bocage. And, while US cities were often safer than overseas combat zones, American civilians lived with some of the same dangers and risks experienced by civilians in London, Paris, and other occupied cities. They may not have seen bombings or the worst violence, but they did face uncontrolled and aggressive troops in their streets.

While some people are aware of the government’s and the military’s obsessive campaign against venereal disease—and the women who were treated inhumanely because of it—most stories of women and troops on the home front center on teary-eyed goodbyes and love separated by an ocean. For many people, especially in coastal cities, the military presence exerted a huge influence on everyday life. Servicemen were neither absent nor peripheral but rather central figures who dictated the often-discordant rhythms of the wartime city. From women taking a route home that circumvented areas well trafficked by troops, business owners struggling to keep brawls from destroying their establishments, to men avoiding amusement zones for fear of being heckled or assailed, civilians of all kinds were forced to adjust their daily lives. Local political officials and municipal figures likewise had to fight to retain control of their increasingly militarized cities. Civil-military conflict grew, both in the halls of political power and in the train cars, bars, and streets of port cities.

World War II cemented the rapid amalgamation of federal power that had first taken hold during World War I. Bursting with new agencies, raking in more taxes, and making greater demands on citizens, the federal government became a leviathan that demanded that civilian life turn toward serving the needs of the state. With soothing intonations and the comforting setting of fireside chats, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt consistently promoted the idea that civilians ought to serve and support a widespread militarization of American life. With this idea came an expansion of executive authority, government bureaucracy, and military power.

Yet Americans did not experience this expansion solely through taxes, propaganda, war bonds, and labor restrictions. Many also encountered it in the form of sailors and soldiers commandeering the everyday places where they lived their lives. Their streets, bars, parks, and trains regularly filled with such friendly invasions, as one writer put it in 1944. This visceral, embodied military presence prompted bitter conflicts over who should control public space, who held jurisdiction over servicemen, and what sacrifices could be tolerated in service of the war. As municipal authorities increasingly buckled to army and navy leaders, women had to navigate the increasingly perilous streets, alleyways, and train cars, attempting to sort the decent men from the wolves. But the story of liberty ports also reveals the limits of that ballooning military authority. The American GI often remained a recalcitrant individual unwilling to abide the demands of civilian norms, military discipline, or, indeed, even the law.

Nationwide, the papers filled with lurid stories of criminal activity perpetrated by soldiers and sailors. The FBI reported crime spikes in 1941, 1942, 1945, and 1946. J. Edgar Hoover also noted that rape and aggravated assault, which increased, have definitely emerged as wartime crimes. In major cities, a 46 percent rise in aggravated assault and a 35 percent spike in rape compared to prewar rates signaled a crisis for all levels of government. One of the key points of this story, however, is that so many men were never arrested or even stopped from committing assaults and harassing civilians. As is still the case today, numerous rapes, fights, and drunken crimes were never reported or pursued by the police. Some African American, Hispanic, and other nonwhite men were tried for and convicted of crimes, but they were not the perpetrators. Nevertheless, the FBI still counted these cases as wins in their ledger books. The data we have ultimately fail to capture what occurred in wartime.

The sexual violence that occurred in liberty ports and boomtowns throughout the war cannot be explained away as typical of the era. Millions of men coursing through ports arrived not merely with the usual levels of privilege but with a sense that the lives of civilians and women were fundamentally less important than theirs. Their uniforms and the legal privileges that came with them placed them above bystanders and municipal cops, encouraging more hostile and riskier behavior. Putting young men into barracks and camps that played up and rewarded belligerent, virile masculinity led to both sexual obsession and misogyny. The specter of death and the political pressures placed on women to provide romance and sex worsened a dangerous situation.

Worst of all, the sexual violence and rampant crime were not secret. Everyone knew that troops coerced, assaulted, and raped women with shocking regularity. Army leaders like General George C. Marshall, rear admirals, MPs, servicemen, municipal officials, writers, journalists, political organizations, civilians, and, most importantly, women in ports all knew the prevalence of harassment, assault, rape, and other violent crimes committed by troops. Again and again, these crimes went brazenly unpunished as military leaders made the welfare of civilians one more casualty of the war. Neither perpetrators nor officials even made much of an effort to cover anything up because they knew they did not need to.

Chapter One

Making the Military Man

By the end of World War II, over sixteen million Americans would serve in the armed forces across a massive global network of ports, cities, towns, bases, and encampments. In early 1939, however, approximately 330,000 troops mostly waited in docked ships and decaying World War I cantonments as Nazi Germany threatened to move on Poland. The United States was not the isolationist slumbering giant depicted by many histories, but its military—particularly the ground forces—had suffered a serious decline in numbers since the Great War, and its infrastructure and traditions were crumbling. The drafting and training of millions of troops were to be an unprecedented administrative and political trial.

Military mobilization planted the seeds of conflict between servicemen, civilians, and women on the home front. From the beginning, the army and the Roosevelt administration faced severe challenges from Congress as they attempted to create a real fighting force. The draft, disorganized military buildup, and haphazard training system together fostered chronically poor morale, policing, and discipline that stretched across the services. Years of underfunding and makeshift repairs meant the military had to scramble to construct adequate camps and then muster an army. The training experiences of the first draftees presaged the coming morale and discipline issues that would undercut attempts to build an orderly and technologically adept army. The attack on Pearl Harbor initially gave dispirited men a sense of purpose and legitimized the privations they bore in half-constructed, stifling camps. Yet draftees continued to reject the old esprit de corps training style, never really embracing the idea of serving for country and freedom. Fighting for girls and brotherhood seemed much more appealing than any ideological motivation.

Lacking an efficient training infrastructure, and, at times, dealing with mutinous troops, military authorities channeled the draftees’ anger and aggression toward civilians. They embraced and institutionalized a barracks culture that brought men together by celebrating swaggering masculinity and the obscene. This sexually aggressive culture devalued the lives and welfare of civilians but increased camaraderie. Demonstrating this particular kind of masculinity became the easiest way for a GI to validate his superiority and privilege even while he was trapped in a system that was stifling and that he mostly despised. Soldiers also learned that being a wolfish, tough military man outside camp could endear them to their comrades, who were otherwise strangers from different corners of the country. Their early off-site adventures taught servicemen how to act when they later reached liberty ports. San Francisco’s Peace Day Riots were germinating as military men caroused in barracks and made their initial excursions into adjoining towns.

Fighting for Conscription

Among the world’s great powers, the United States was perhaps the least prepared to fight. Despite the conflagration engulfing Asia, Africa, and Europe, proponents of a peacetime draft faced political infighting and protests. Conventional wisdom held that the American public would never support a program that stole young men away from their families and workplaces, especially after years of economic hardship. Fan mail to Charles Lindbergh and crank letters to antifascists opposing American involvement in any war were shot through with anti-Semitic conspiracies. The letters captured a broad antipathy to intervention and an irrational sense that cabals were forcing the United States to confront a manufactured threat. Some Americans still felt some affinity for Germany in the wake of Versailles, and many more expressed the virulent anti-Semitism captured by Arthur Miller’s Focus.

But President Roosevelt sensed that mobilization was near to hand—particularly since Nazi Germany had recently invaded France. Aware of the lukewarm, if not hostile, attitudes of Americans toward mass conscription, he announced his support for universal government service for every young person on June 18, 1940, as Paris fell. Rather than explicitly calling for a draft, the president compared this service to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal public works program that employed young, unemployed men, while praising the value of discipline and of fostering a toughness of moral and physical fiber in the young people of America. Opponents of conscription and FDR attacked the move as both a poor disguise for the draft and another New Deal program, with Alf Landon—Roosevelt’s opponent in 1936—noting the president’s weasel words that obscured the call for compulsory military training.

Roosevelt’s proposal soon took shape as the Burke-Wadsworth Act, also known as the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. The bill called for the registration of over fifty million men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four. From them, the army would be allowed to select—selective service officials despised the term draft and the connotation that the state was simply gobbling up manpower—up to 900,000 men aged twenty-one to thirty-five who would serve no more than one year during peacetime. It was a small step toward building a viable armed forces.

Military leaders and the Roosevelt administration privately confided that years of poor funding, a weak munitions industry, and mismanagement had left the US Army less prepared than its counterparts in countries like Spain, Belgium, and Switzerland. The marines spent much of their resources in the interwar years fending off attempts by the army to destroy or annex the corps. The army sought to eliminate what it saw as an annoying runt that might grow into a rival service. In addition, it had been failing to recruit men to either the National Guard or the regular army, and its leaders all but begged the Senate Military Affairs Committee to push Burke-Wadsworth through.

Prior to the introduction of Burke-Wadsworth, in May 1940, Chief of Staff George Marshall had organized a humiliating public demonstration of the army’s woeful state—likely with an eye toward building support for conscription and improved funding. He had mobilized seventy thousand troops for war games along a mock front in Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas. The army’s supposedly hardened regular troops performed maneuvers through mud, swamps, brush, and challenging hills, moving nearly 150 miles a day as they pretended to assault machine-gun nests, break opponent lines, and take down enemy aircraft. Families and the press gathered to see the spectacle, but anyone who watched was left with little doubt as to how poorly the military might perform in a real war. Over the course of a week, twelve soldiers died in accidents, almost four hundred suffered injuries and illness, and huge amounts of equipment and machinery failed. Later on, two flight crews totaling eleven men died when their bombers crashed. Civilians on porches and rooftops also witnessed the folly of officers unwilling to abandon cavalry. In one instance, two hundred mounted horses charged an armored brigade, ineffectually attacking the unfazed tanks. Time noted: Against Europe’s total war, the US Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.

Marshall had, nevertheless, won the day. He proved that the army needed dedicated funding and manpower, particularly for armored divisions. It was a successful experiment, he said. It showed us our shortcomings. Later that year, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (R-MA) echoed Marshall: The fact remains that our Army today is not what it ought to be.

Influential military figures like General John J. Pershing—the leader of the World War I expeditionary forces—joined the public offensive to sell Burke-Wadsworth. He argued disingenuously, however, that the measure was important less for military strength than because it would promote democracy by bringing together young men from all walks of life. Indeed, he even suggested that the draft might well be the determining factor in keeping us out of war. Army officials noted that voluntary recruitment efforts had failed and again asked the Senate Military Affairs Committee to pass Burke-Wadsworth.

Pershing’s comments—militarist language clad in an appeal to democratic virtue—attempted to stymie the two major criticisms of compulsory military service: first, that it would bring the United States closer to war and, second, that it would foster antidemocratic or fascistic ideas among young Americans. The administration’s push for a peacetime draft was quickly met with protest, with both those criticisms driving the demonstrators. In May 1940, anticipating the push toward a draft, three hundred City College of New York students picketed an ROTC drill, holding signs proclaiming, To Hell with War. Following the introduction of the Burke-Wadsworth bill, religious organizations mobilized to denounce the draft not only for its failure to exempt priests and members of religious orders but also because they believed it threatened the nation’s fundamental values. Methodist leaders protested directly to senators on the Military Affairs Committee while also releasing fiery statements to the major papers. Boston’s Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam and other church leaders declared that the conscription bill was un-American and an undemocratic proposal, springing like a mushroom from swamps of unjustifiably hysterical fear: It constitutes a weak, unintelligent proposal to take up slack in unemployment, and by its folly is doomed to defeat real democracy and tends to prepare the way for war. The draft was seen as an insidious infection of the free life of a democratic people [that] apes totalitarian conscription. Oxnam concluded by insisting that, if Congress passed the draft, it would end the American tradition of individual liberty by resorting to the Nazi and Fascist forms which brought totalitarian Europe to its present tragedy. Others wrote to papers to register their disdain for both the draft and Roosevelt’s support for Britain. We are not at war with anybody, wrote one critic. England, on the other hand, declared war against Germany and is being attacked. This Nation has gone stark-mad through fear engendered by President Roosevelt. The United States ought to stay out of Europe’s power wars, and advocates of the draft must have a guilty conscience to be shrieking about the Hun goblins.

Students, mothers, and other concerned citizens soon took to the streets to stop the passage of Burke-Wadsworth. These protests were highly theatrical, creating public spectacles worthy of press coverage. In late July, three people dressed as mummies marched through downtown Boston with messages like Don’t Be a Mummy, Speak for Peace scrawled on their bedsheet costumes. In Los Angeles, the American Peace Crusade paraded with placards denouncing conscription, while two students posed as a newly married couple flanked by two grieving mothers. Some twelve hundred protesters crowded into Turner’s, a boxing and wrestling arena in Washington, DC, to hear speakers throw verbal lefts and rights at the Burke-Wadsworth conscription measure and call for Capitol Hill marches and vigils. The next day, DC police dispersed several hundred protesters, fighting and arresting leaders like the Methodist minister Owen Knox. The Democratic and Republican offices in New York were surrounded by picket lines of young people carrying signs proclaiming sentiments like Conscription Is a Blitzkrieg against Democracy. Three thousand members of the National Maritime Union violently protested in New York City, but not before publishing a resolution that framed compulsory conscription as a fascistic measure backed by a big business clique.

The protests soon reached Congress, where a thousand protesters chanted Ain’t Gonna Study War No More. One member